Rumpelstilzchen

Jürgen Reble 1989

Review:

The “Piccolo-Film” credit at the opening of Rumpelstilzchen signals it as a “found footage” film. Piccolo released Super-8 prints for the German home movie market and Rumpelstilzchen was a 1955 B-Movie version of the Brothers Grimm story. Thus, originating from a Super-8 print of a 1950s version of the nineteenth century Grimm Brothers’ version of a traditional folktale, the provenance of Rumpelstilzchen is interesting. The Grimms were known to embellish, and for their Children’s and Household Tales (1812–1857) they introduced a spinning wheel and a miller’s daughter who could spin straw into gold to the Rumpelstilzchen tale. The spinning wheel sequences become a recurring motif in Reble’s reworking, a visual analogy to the reels on a film projector. Metaphorically the “straw” of the Super-8 film that Reble spins into “gold” is the live transformation of film material off the reel that Reble regularly practices in the mixed-media film performance, appropriately entitled Alchemy.

Rumpelstilzchen is not an exercise in meaningful, gratuitous deconstruction or recontextualisation; material distortions layer and abstract the images, the narrative is a fragmented, hazy, hallucinatory drama as images and voices loop and echo. This emphasises and reawakens the disturbing Gothic strangeness of the folk story. Imbued with a darker German romanticism filtered through post-industrial detritus, Rumpelstilzchen is in the time-honoured folkloric tradition of writing over; contemporary in its retelling, retaining traces of its earlier form.

PASSION is a film diary in which Reble accompanies his unborn child through the year, following the seasons until his birth. Reble's unfamiliar chemistry generates slowly pulsating structures and colors. Micro and macroscopic imagery build a near abstract, hypnotic landscape - an intimate perception of creation. (Light Cone Video)

THE GOLDEN GATE weaves together fragments of nature
films about insects and reptiles, images from space programmes and astronomy
with the filmmaker's own footage of human activity from his immediate
environment. The experience of years of research into the chemical manipulation
of silver nitrate during and after developing are applied to the film's
images. As a result, they have a more painterly quality evoking an atmosphere
somewhere between dream and reality. During the course of the film the
observations have less and less to do with reality. Extremely long exposures
emphasise the transience of human activity. If the subsequent darkness
is transcended an inner light is created. "The golden gate"
is a term which dates back to pre-Christian mythology describing the
spiritualisation and renewal of divine fire by passing through the winter
solstice. The music for the film, composed by Thomas Köner, is
no mere accompaniment, rather it forms a sympathetic layer which intensifies
the tensions in the flow of images. Just as the film is not connected
by a traditional pattern of structure and narration, the music also
transcends the usual pattern of rhythm and melody. In this way an audio-visual
half-world is created which the viewer perceives more via his stomach
than his brain.(Jürgen Reble)

I came across an old industrial film by Siemens on computer
and their language. To better appreciate the film I first of all
cut off the sound, I then took out the colours and reduced the speed.
Slowly the very substance of the film emerged and I began to see
the deep meditation that was hidden in the film. Finally I made a
black and white copy of the material and let the images pulsate in
a general breathing rhythm.

This film is made by some beautiful and unique
alchemical transformations of the film material itself. It is a visual
expedition into the world of matter, which shows the bizarre richness
of the smallest particles floating in the film emulsion. The crystals'
constantly changing structures, enriched by the textures, bring about
an almost tactile experience, a visual expression of its own base matter.(Jürgen
Reble)

This film was provoked by a trip on the overhead
railway through the centre of Chicago in 1991. I filmed a twelve minute
piece facing forwards in the direction we were driving. Three years
later I came across the film material once more. The memory of it had
faded, and its images were just as vague. So I worked on the material
using a bleaching bath. The complex, cuboid-like architecture of the
city came out in a test of the substantial and then sank back into the
minority - dissolving to a lump of cosmic dust. I was first able to
identify a projection of the experienced, within the undercurrent of
disintegration.
Many years passed by and dust settled on the filmcarrier. Sound researcher
Thomas Köner ran the dust through the optical sound system on the
projector and a crackling sound could be heard. He then undertook a
more exact examination of this dust-noise. Ultimately a tone composition
came to fruition, which I transferred onto the final copy of the film
in the form of an optical soundtrack.

An old trailer had been in the trees of a garden
for months. Now and then it was coated with various chemicals. Through
chemical disintegration and weathering the old plot of the film resolved
to a great extent. Colours emerged from black and white. Black areas
transformed into mountaineous regions.

Arktis is a poetic approach to the bizarre landscape of ice, rock, and water; a journey to the arctic ocean and surroundings, with images and sounds.

Seventy one-second scenes of the arctic serve as the original material, which is then transformed in its texture, time lapse, color and light qualities to create a material reminiscent of landscape painting.

The sound collage uses fragments from sounds of nature and samples from a piece of music for violin and song, which are also transformed in a manner similar to that of the visual pictures.

Beta
SP PAL ,
Stereo Sound, 30 minutes
Distribution: Lightcone, Paris

Reviews:

This new video is a surprising departure for
Reble, who is best known for his alchemical treatment of celluloid.
Digitally processed, it transforms shots of the arctic landscape,
drawn from education films and travelogues, into a virtual fantasy
world illuminated by the hallucinatory half-light of evening. (Mark
Webber, London Film Festival 2004)

The material used to construct Arktis – Zwischen Licht und Dunkel (Jürgen Reble, 2004) was taken from a variety of films about the arctic region. These clips were then heavily treated, manipulating the texture, duration, saturation and contrast of the images. The film looks like an unknown world, through perseverance though you become accustomed to the dark pulsating and mysterious landscapes. Arktis is deeply engrossing, drawing you into its “half-world” of twilight images, neither abstract nor literal. The gradual alienating effect gave me the increasing sense of seeing a world not meant for humans. This sublime world is perhaps the inverse of Godard's Purgatory, a world devoid of expression, of peoples and nations. (George Clark, December 2004)

Video images, shot from the Yamanote train that follows its
route around the city of Tokyo have been transferred to Black & White
16mm film in order to treat them by hand with chemicals and
create a soundtrack using grains. - A dark journey through
a world made up of cloudy, lost grains of film in a microscopic
dimension. (Media Art Festival, Osnabrück 2006- Catalogue)

mini DV PAL, 19 minutes, Stereo Sound
Distribution: Lightcone,
Paris

Materia Obscura - The film
Jürgen Reble 2009

English

This work is based on some excerpts of the film "Instabile Materie" which I realized in 1995. Sorce material were handprocessed 16mm film stripes which I covered with chemicals. In this so called "chemograms" the used substances mostly salts became moulding shapes. Years later I digitized parts of the film frame by frame in high resolution and started with the computer to slow down the speed just to analyse the sequence of events. So arose a morphology of the film emulsion with the embeded substances and a bizarre, strange world full of magic revealed.

Tabula Smaragdina

Jürgen Reble 1996 - 2010

This final digital version is based on the performance TABULA SMARAGDINA which I played together with the musician Thomas Köner between 1997 and 2004. In 2008 I started to digitize the 16 mm originals frame by frame in high definition just to reorganize the materials and give them after all a form for a linear screening. Contents are cristallized salts and dyes wich are changing rhythm and structure constantly between moving images. Inside the chemical elements of the film appears the bizarre richness of its materiality.

Nobody knows why things happen and why our paths cross at bifurcations. They'll certainly be lost forever if nobody writes them down. Once set in motion, the process of historiography can only be followed on meandering paths.